By Aldo Padilla

There’s something in Chile that transforms itself into an ideal territory for messianic beliefs. It’s possible that this natural prison that is the Andes mountain range was propitious to the growth of this nation, isolated from its neighbors and all reality, a nation built based on individualism, the essence of this country at the end of the world. In this conventional limit, a chosen one, a different being is being waited upon, either in the flat infinitude of the northern desert or in the austral green masses.

This southern territory acquires a complex personality, characterized by the still valid struggle of marginalized villages, who are treated like terrorists by an state that, by staging fake attacks and running trials whose verdicts are already known, have sought to put the society against them, this people who seek to recover what they have lost. King (Rey), the recent work of Chilean filmmaker Niles Atallah, who obtained a jury prize in Rotterdam, is precisely about this awaiting of a messiah.

Part of the central idea of King is reflected in the production of the work itself. In the film, a trial on Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, King of Patagoina and Araucania, condemned for public disorder, is represented as a theatrical work, in which the characters are lost among masks, and where the insane franc-mapuchean king seems to have a version of a story he has no proof of.

And Atallah describes this process of the materiality of a misé in scene of artificially transformed fragments, locked in a garden, and subjected to a passing of time, simulating a found footage experience. Is there a natural or forced distortion of history? This story, the story of the old local villages, is the version told by the conquerors. It’s possible that they will still bury this history, waiting for their descendants to dig it and interpret it however they want.

By Mónica Delgado

Rifle is a western of implacable ellipsis. The fields and cabins of Brazil, near the border with Uruguay, seem to shelter the last gauchos, still immersed in old livestock practices, people who live with a feeling of resistance towards new business men in these terrains of cows, sheep and plantations. Davi Pretto centers his story of secret rebellion in a context of a quiet adolescent of ghostly appearance, who puts order like a lost and furious deity, always aided with a rifle.

It is inevitable to associate Rifle with the recent Valeska Grisenbach’s Western, since both films deal with a peculiar study of different topics of the American Far West (the need of a landscape, a declining hero, the urgent affirmation of an identity) and also because both of these films escape from the commonplace, veering towards other argumental and aesthetic options, where this archetypical skeleton is evoked and transformed.

Davi Pretto has realized a work of Fordian halo, of anthological ellipsis, with an evocative use of space, a film that proposes a story of justice men made out of silences, of pure actions as part of a preservation road, aiming to leave the familiar and friend environment intact, through bullets and precise shots.

KING
SPECIAL PROJECTION
Written and directed by: Niles Atallah
Cinematography: Benjamín Echazarreta
Editing: Benjamin Mirguet
Sound: Roberto Espinoza
Music: Sebastián Jatz
Producer: Lucie Kalmar / Mômerade
Mômerade, DiluvioSales Mômerade
Cast: Claudio Riveros, Rodrigo Lisboa
Chile, Francia, Holanda, Alemania, Qatar, 2017

RIFLE
SPECIAL PROJECTION
Directed by: Davi Pretto
Producer: Paola Wink
Script: Davi Pretto, Richard Tavares
Cinematography: Glauco Firpo
Art Direction: Richard Tavares
Editing: Bruno Carboni
Sound Editing: Marcos Lopes, Tiago Bello
Cast: Dione Avila de Olveira, Evaristo Goularte, Francisco Fabrício Dutra dos Santos, Sofia Ferreira
Brasil, 2016